This thing made me mad. Ok all the flag vending lately may be annoying, but they are responding to a fundamental need to feel like we are all hanging together. To engender fear in order to sell your product, though, that's marketing terrorism, it's profiteering. It's wrong.

I don't recall what kind of sport ute it was on and probably wouldn't mention it anyway, considering the automaker might not like to be associated with such a thing. But if you see it, and you get inspired to call the number and give them a piece of your mind, don't let me stop you. Don't let me encourage you either, because you know that would be inciting malicious mischief and I wouldn't wanna do that.

So anyway, back at Condo Napalm, the Geek Posse called up to say that they wanted to go check out the site where one of the members is having a house built. Not that there is anything to see yet, but it's fun to check out the neighborhood and infrastructure and kinda try to visualize the thing.

After that, we called up another stray member of the Posse who wanted to go bowling. I let that sit in my head for a second and then said, "Sure!" I have a mental image of bowling, born of Redneckistan and cultivated by the US Army, as an incredibly square thing to do. But hey, we weren't doing anything else at the moment.

We converged at Geek Castle in order to stuff our sizeable weights into a rented Mitsubishi SUV (Don't ask - long complicated story, and I haven't gotten pseudonyms from the participants yet, which makes telling a story hard.) and bounce and jiggle our way to the alley. We got there just as all the under-21s were being hustled out, with law enforcement to help. The guys say that it's a policy to kick them out after a certain hour.

So when we entered the place, my thought was, this ain't yer dad's bowling alley. I'd heard of these but never got around to visiting one. It was really a giant disco with lanes. Between the lasers, dancing spotlights, fog machines, and giant-screen TVs playing music videos alternated with computer graphic "visualizations" (and some of that seemed much more than LSD inspired), it was something of a sensory stampede. I liked it.

The range of beer available was highly disappointing, the food (snack machines) even more so, and cigarettes (none) more still. Even so, we had a good lively couple games stuffed with horrible scores. We decided the lane was defective. Of the five of us, in the first game I came in second, and in the second one I was next to last. In other words, we all suck.

Back at Geek Castle, four of us opted to go for a walk, while the fifth (and only actually skinny one of us) said he wasn't in for this exercise thing, and bid his fond adieus. So we took a nice long pleasant walk that ended up at a location that once upon a time was meant to be a housing development, but had failed miserably. The model homes had been bulldozed long ago, and no other houses had been built at all. The whole thing was overgrown and reputed to belong to the city of Boca now.

There was considerable construction going on with the street adjacent to this place, so there was equipment and rubbish all over the place. From some distance I saw a yellow glow and asked what it was, but we didn't find out until nearly on top of it. Next to a dumpster, someone had tossed a whole bunch of rubbish, to include a Bob's Barricade that had evidently been stomped by a backhoe or something. This thing was twisted beyond hope, mangled cruelly, and no one had thought to put it out of its misery before discarding it. Its lamp shone balefully out into the cold and lonely night, with none but dirt and trees to bear witness.

I felt bad for it. I have felt very much like it several times in my life. I could identify.